Same damn thing.

I am, perhaps, having a small writerly crisis. One piece of evidence: no blog for days and days and days. Second piece of evidence: putting together my writing sample for a grant application--who knows what's good and what's not? WHO KNOWS. Third piece of evidence: a 'draft' of a 'thing' I'm supposed to be writing for 'work' that has not arisen to the status of 'draft' whatsoever. Not in the least.

I am, however, pasting text into a fillable form to finish curriculum projects overdue for a long time.

[READING NOTE: please add a counter melody of wretched screaming and a bass line of the F word, punctuating everything. Like, forever.]

POINT ONE: blog. If I write again about (a) my dinner, (b) the weather, (c) dog, (d) complaints of a variety of sorts, (e) the occasional melancholy blah blah blah, does that mean I don't have anything to say?

POINT ONE (A): I don't want to be a robot, not even a blog-post generating robot. If my post ideas feel A-U-T-O-matic (as Prince would say), should I resist them?

POINT TWO: writing sample. On the one hand, who knows? On the other hand, who cares? This way lies nihilism. I don't want to be a nihilistic writer. Also, I want to get that grant. Which I won't. But still.

POINT TWO (B): you have to write what you write. You also should press yourself beyond what you already know how to write.

POINT TWO (C): Exhausting.

POINT THREE: 'draft' of a 'thing'. Why won't it just write itself? Come up with its own scenarios and metaphors? Why do we write anyway? Anything at all?

POINT THREE (D): nihilism. It's what's for dinner. Also breakfast and lunch, and snacks, and dreams.

POINT THREE (E): why are there no snacks in my vicinity?

I had an idea while I was walking across the quad today: the 500 word project. I think I will resurrect it. I think I will try to write 500 words, five days a week. This sounds like

• a project that will
• give shape to my desire, still, to write, and will also
• forestall my anxieties about writing the same thing over and over again, because
• even if I want to write about my dinner, I'm not actually writing about dinner, because
• I'll be writing in the 500 Words project. 
• Totally different thing.

Finally: 'draft' of a 'thing': I hate you and you can just go die for all I care.

But I will be 'drafting' you tomorrow, and that's a fact.

Love,

htms

For my daughters.

[cue: ]

Today is my granddaughter's birthday. My granddaughter in Scotland, whose birthday party was cupcake-themed, who is a writer, one who, at eight, would like to have her own blog. For our birthday present, we sent a pet hospital with a family of tiny dalmatians, because she likes all things having to do with pets and also crafts.

Today I worked on a project, a little film about feminism, that arose for me when, a couple of years ago, a blogger I read, a young Mormon woman, wrote about feminism and concluded that she probably wasn't one. (She has since reconsidered and to some extent reversed this stance. I was outraged at the first stance and so gladdened by the second--kind of absurd. But still:) I began thinking about feminism because of this blogger, and my sense (like everyone else's of my generation) that young women feel that they're over feminism--it holds nothing for them, the world has moved on, its big injustices have been rectified, or something like that. So I took my camera to a family gathering and interviewed my sisters and daughters and nieces and aunt and mother.

I put all this footage in a Final Cut Express project maybe last summer. I tried to figure out what I would do with it. What would I have to say? what stuff of my own would I add? And more: why was I making this project? For whom?

Today, I worked with the footage, adjusting brightness and blur and saturation. I watched them all. When I looked at the face of my mother, in the thumbnail for the little video clip, I thought, for my mother, who said, yes, she was a feminist, and who, along with my father, gave me a sense of my worth. And for my father, too--his father and mother invested in the education of their daughters, an attitude he carried forward.

I listened to and smiled at what my sisters said, my sisters who have both worked, one a nurse, the other a teacher, their whole adult lives, and who are both mothers. For my sisters, who are smart and tough and inspiring, and for my aunt, who has been smart and sassy presence, just ten years older than me, so cool my whole life, a musician and a mom and, oh yeah, raised two excellent sons. She gave me a roar in her interview, as in I am woman, hear me.

It's when I think of my children that my questions matter more, at least to me. I want them to live in a whole world--not only their world, but wider and farther--where there's no need for feminism, because there are good laws and cultural mores, opportunity and fairness, and no fear or hatred of women. This world isn't that world, though. I remember when my daughter was born--the daughter that made me a mother, the one who's the mother of the birthday girl--how piercingly I felt all this. How much I wanted that better world, how utterly crucial it felt. In a very real way, becoming a mother was what sealed the deal for me.

Today, it's that better world that I long for, that the better part of me works for, for my daughters and sons, for their children--this is what makes me a feminist.

Happy birthday to Miriam, baby girl now eight years old, the one who made me a grandmother. I have hope for that better world in part because of you.

Baking: an essay.

Today I made panettone and baked and iced sugar cookies (I had help from singing son, soccer coach son, and the historian on the icing and sprinkling).  Here are some facts:  

1. yeast does not last forever, even when it is refrigerated.  Shall I buy another economy size package of yeast?  I believe I shall, but after two years, I will consider it spent.
2. farmer eggs are the best eggs.
3. currants are cuter than raisins.  
4. golden raisins are shinier and more glamorous than your usual raisin.
5. gel-based food coloring makes very very very vivid icing.
6. no matter how many kinds of sprinkles and sanding sugar and nonpareils and other assorted decorating doodads you happen to have in your pantry, you will always be missing some or another kind of doodad that would make a more perfect cookie.
7. panettone is delicious, especially when the lemon zest you use in the dough is from a Meyer lemon.
8. a pair of cookie cutters, a pear with a teeny partridge to sit atop it, bears only a metonymic, and yet still incoherent, relation to the partridge-in-a-pear-tree narrative. 
9. at Christmastime, there is an ancient cookie economy that reasserts itself in seasonal fashion.
10. some people would have it that one can substitute a candle, an ornament, even a Christmas cd for the traditional plate of cookies in the cookie economy.  This is a falsehood.  Nonetheless, there is a new and competing ancillary-Christmas-goods economy vying against the cookie economy.  

I fear for the cookie economy.  But I will be distributing plates of cookies, augmented by judicious scatterings of caramels, in my neighborhood tomorrow.  Also, the traditional almond-cardamom bread and butterscotch crescent rolls, but only to the very favored few.  Never let it be said that the circulation of baked goods faltered upon my watch.  Never!